I meet with a Chinese grad student weekly for him to practice his English. We talk about politics, food, culture. It's fun. Today I sat down and he had a serious look on his face. "I need to ask you a question. My wife was invited to a . . . baby shower. She found out it's a party, but will there be . . . water?" Only after I explained did I remember the old 'terrifying if literal' twitter joke.

I wrote a small patch for Mastodon that got accepted yesterday. It lets you set up an email domain whitelist for your instance. For example, if your school wants to set up an instance just for students, they can do it by limiting signups to addresses at `whatever.edu`.

It's actually really awesome that Mastodon attracted a shitload of users who largely aren't aware that the underlying GNUSocial platform is old.

You know why?

Because it means we can do this over and over.

Every time someone releases a new implementation with different-looking chrome on top, it can go through its own marketing and media cycle and garner new users. *And the network effect will be cumulative.*

> The text at the beginning of the movie explained that Hanka Robotics is making a being that’s the best of human and the best of robotics. For some reason, the best stuff they make happens to be white.

> When white feminists don’t know what to say about race, they go for the feminist thing.